Then came his last two outings against Boston and Indiana, during which Parker set successive season-highs with 26 and 33 points on a combined 27-for-40 shooting. More than half those baskets came in the paint, including nine in last night’s victory over Indiana, which allows fewer points in that area of the court than any team in the NBA.

Parker’s shot charts from those two games:

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That’s pretty much what the Spurs have come to expect from Parker, who, for all the improvement he’s made as a jump shooter, remains most effective penetrating and finishing around the rim.

Indeed, his patented teardrop, now a mandatory weapon for any undersized guard, was about the only thing Spurs assistant coach Chip Engellend left alone when the two began reconstructing Parker’s stroke after the 2005 championship.

As told by Michael Rosenberg in this week’s Sports Illustrated:

On their first day together, Parker took one-handed shots from six to eight feet. They moved on to his balance, legs and release, until eventually Parker had a smooth jumper. Then he added a pull-up shot off the dribble. It was all designed to augment the one shot that Engelland would not touch.

“His teardrop, I applaud,” Engelland says. “It’s a marvel. I just cheer it on.”

Yet that marvel had largely abandoned Parker this season until his last two outings.

Despite some good-natured goading from Parker’s eternal tormentor, Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich, it wasn’t necessarily an issue of aggression. His free throw attempts are down to 2.9 attempts per game, second-fewest of his career. But even before the last two games Parker was averaging five shots per game at the rim, almost half a shot more than last year’s campaign, arguably the finest of his career.

The big difference was in the accuracy of those attempts.

As Doc Rivers loves to say, it’s a make/miss league. And Parker was on the wrong end of that equation through 10 games, sinking just 54 percent of his shots at the basket after shooting between 62.7 and 65.7 percent over the previous six seasons according to Hoop Data, annually ranking among the the league leaders for guards. He’s back up to 58 percent after making 13 of 19 attempts at the rim over his past two games.

Not only is his shot on the upturn, Parker’s playmaking has never been better. His assists per game (7.8), assist percentage (43.0), assist/turnover ratio (3.72) and turnover percentage (11.4) are all career-bests.

With injuries depriving the Spurs of their top two small forwards and Manu Ginobili still trying to find some semblance of consistency, Parker couldn’t have picked a better time to get back on track.

Granted, two games is an even smaller sample size than the one we already had. But considering Parker’s past performance and relative youth, it’s reasonable to assume the pendulum is swinging back the other way after he failed to hit more than half his shots in nine of San Antonio’s first 10 games.